Humour in the Classroom

[John Simkin]

Shanet’s story reminds me of the time I invited a parent in to talk to my students. We were studying the subject of social class in Y10 Sociology. The students had to draw a pyramid showing the class structure. I gave them a list of different occupations and they had to place them in the appropriate social class section.

A few days later one of my students gave me a letter from her father. The letter stated that he had been looking at his daughter’s book and discovered that she had placed his occupation (a refuse collector) at the bottom of the pyramid (unskilled manual worker). He took exception to that and insisted that his job should appear higher up in the pyramid.

I phoned the man up and explained the official guidelines on how class membership was defined. When he complained about these guidelines, I invited him to come into school and to explain his point of view to the sociology class. I thought this could be the basis of a good debate on the importance of jobs such as refuse collectors.

I was a bit worried about the reception he would receive and gave them a talk about the need to respect the views of visitors, etc. On the day of the visit I was apprehensive about how the lesson would work out. This fear was increased when he arrived at my classroom. He was wearing his best suit. However, it was his brightly coloured and expensive waistcoat that really caught the eye. It was an obvious attempt to show the class that he had money. This was reflected in his talk. Instead of explaining why his job was so important, he concentrated on all the fiddles he could get up to in his job. Apparently, he was making vast amounts of money from going through the rubbish he was collecting from the homes in the area. This included wedding rings and other personal items found in rubbish bins.

I found the whole experience highly embarrassing. So did the man’s daughter. However, the students were fantastic. They did not laugh at him and instead asked him sensible questions. Some evenly gently raised questions about the morality of not giving people back their wedding rings. I am sure the students learnt a lot from the lesson. I know I did.